If I Buy 300 Kg of Soy Wax Across Multiple Manufacturing Lots, Should I Test Each Lot Before Mixing It into Regular Production?

Yes — check every lot before it touches production, and keep lots apart until it passes

Testing each lot is cheap; untangling a mixed batch is impossible. That is the whole argument. If 300 kg arrives as three deliveries, each delivery is potentially a different manufacturing lot, and you have no supplier lot data to tell you whether they match — CSI publishes no lot numbers, certificates of analysis or batch-consistency data, and many suppliers publish none either. The only evidence you will ever have is what you check yourself. If a lot goes straight into the melter alongside the previous one and the festive candles start sweating or tunnelling, you cannot tell which lot did it, which candles contain it, or whether the next lot will do the same.

The check does not need to be a full qualification. The wax is the one you already approved; you are looking for a difference, not proving suitability from scratch. A level-1 lot check — bag inspection, an unscented puck, and two candles from the new lot burned beside two from your retained sample of the approved lot — costs ₹938.10 in oil, wicks and jars per lot, and uses about 736 g of the lot's own wax including the retained sample: 0.7% of a 100 kg delivery. Against it sits roughly ₹1,43,877.85 of materials in the 518 candles that lot will make.

So the rule is: quarantine, check, release, then produce. Every delivery goes to a labelled HOLD shelf on arrival. Nothing from it enters regular production until it passes. After release, run one lot per production run wherever you can; if you must blend lots, do it deliberately, in a recorded ratio, and only lots that have each passed on their own. A lot that fails stays on hold and is escalated, not diluted.

Step one: give every lot a name, because no one else will

You cannot test, segregate or trace what you cannot name. Since CSI publishes no lot numbers, build your own lot label from what you do know: the wax, the delivery date and the bag. Write it on every bag the day it arrives, on the HOLD shelf tag, on the retained sample and on every batch sheet that uses the bag. If the supplier's bag carries any printed batch or date code, copy it next to yours — but do not depend on it.

The level-1 lot check: five steps on the day a lot arrives

Level 1 is the routine check for every delivery of a wax you have already approved. The control is wax from the approved lot — the wax your recipe was proven on. A 250 g retained sample is a long-term reference, not enough to pour control candles from every season, so also hold back a control reserve of the approved lot: about 1,309 g covers the control candles and pucks for three lot checks, and a sealed 5 kg bag covers a year of them. If you kept none, a finished candle from your last approved batch is a weaker control; note its age. Two candles of each, same oil lot, same wick, same jar, same day, is a labelled working practice for a routine lot check, not a standard.

When a lot fails: hold, escalate, never dilute

If the level-1 check shows a difference on any line, the lot stays on HOLD and moves to level 2: a full side-by-side comparison of four candles from the lot against four from the retained sample — three burned, one shelved — through to a full-life burn. That costs ₹1,672.06 in oil, wicks and jars and takes the cure time plus about two weeks of burning. Meanwhile, send photos of the bags, the pucks and the candles to the supplier on WhatsApp; for CSI that is +91 7397976926. Production carries on from released lots.

After release: run lots separately, or blend deliberately

Once lots have each passed, there are two sound ways to use them. Run per lot: each production run draws from one lot, and the lot label goes on the batch sheet. This keeps perfect traceability: if a customer complaint arrives in January, you know exactly which lot made that candle and you have its retained sample. Blend deliberately: if your melter takes more than one bag at a time and lots run out mid-day, mix released lots in a fixed, recorded ratio — for example, a 10 kg melt of 5 kg from lot A and 5 kg from lot B, written on the batch sheet as "A-07 + B-01, 50/50". You lose some precision, but you never lose the record.

With 5 kg bags, running per lot is usually the easier choice: each SKU's festive run can come from one lot. That is one more practical reason to buy Chunks as 5 kg bags rather than 10 kg, beyond the ₹9.00 saving. The Diwali 300 kg plan shows how to schedule deliveries so that each SKU's run stays inside one lot.

The priced lot-check kit and what it protects

The check costs 0.65% of what the lot will put into jars. The wax is only about 40% of each candle's materials: a bad lot does not just waste wax, it wastes the oil, wicks and jars poured with it. Labour, packaging, freight and GST are excluded here and make the real exposure larger.

The decision rule for 300 kg across multiple lots

For this maker: buy the festive wax as Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, 20 × 5 kg per delivery (₹59,800.00 each, ₹1,79,400.00 for 300 kg), ask on WhatsApp whether it can come as one delivery, and run the level-1 check on each delivery the day it arrives. Release lot A into the first SKUs while B and C wait their turn on the HOLD shelf. If all three pass, the season runs on three traceable lots; if one fails, you have lost a day and ₹938.10 instead of a festive batch.

Related questions on lots and bulk buying

This page decides how to release multiple lots into production. The Diwali 300 kg plan dates the purchase; scaling to 500 kg a month explains which supplier documents and consistency checks matter more as volume grows; and the procurement-system capstone folds lot checks into reorder points and pack choices. In the supplier-QC cluster, incoming QC when a delivery behaves differently, how many candles before releasing a new lot and retained samples from every delivery go deeper on each control.

Frequently asked questions